PermPlacement Recruiters: What Should You Be Billing?

This week, we released our fourth annual North American Staffing and Recruiting Trends Report, titled “A Numbers Game.” Based on a survey of more than 1,300 recruiting agency professionals, “A Numbers Game” is comprised of performance benchmarks (including hit rate, fill rate, time-to-fill, applications per job post, and submissions per hire), metrics, and real revenue and salary figures. We segmented the findings by primary recruitment type (perm, temp, contract, exec search, RPO), size, role of respondent, industry and role for which respondents recruited.

One of the questions we asked in our survey that we didn’t end up including in the final report was directed at recruiting professionals specializing in permanent placement. We asked these respondents what they’d consider to be an “acceptable” amount of individual billings for a recruiter at their agencies. The findings were very interesting. The average expectation of what constitutes “acceptable” individual billings for a recruiter at a permanent placement agency is $251,675.

Perm recruiters at firms with between 11 and 74 recruiters and salespeople be warned – expectations for your annual billings are high.

It turns out that respondents who recruit for sales and legal roles had the highest standards. They think a perm recruiter’s “acceptable” annual billings ought to be $323,000.

Broken out by role of respondent, it seems that salespeople have inflated expectations of what recruiters should be able to generate financially. Their expectations of what a recruiter should bill were more than 50 percent higher than recruiters’ own expectations of $243,000 (the latter being lower than the overall average of $251,675). Since salespeople generally make more money than recruiters, as we showcase in the Compensation section of the Trends Report, these heightened expectations aren’t really a shock. Interesting to note, however – sales VPs didn’t expect much at all from recruiters.

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